Coleridge deserves some critiquing too

We've all done our fair share of bashing Wordsworth, but I think we should save a few slaps for Coleridge. He's smarter than old Wordy yes, but he's not all that consistent either. For example, we've got him critiquing those who "sacrificed the heart to the head," and therefore critiquing reason as a lower faculty than the Romantic expressions of emotion, but he himself indulges in some more empirical/rational techniques (584). When he's discussing how he came to determine the difference between fancy and imagination, he states "repeated meditations led me first to suspect (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction)" which sounds a lot like a scientific process (585). For a Romantic man who was supposed to scorn empiricism and value sensibility over rationality, Coleridge seems to do the opposite on this point.
Another issue I have with him is his seeming desire to be writing for the "middle and lower classes of society" it appears that this is not really the audience he wants to have. When he talks about how Wordsworth comes under attack for his ideas, his defense of his friend is that Wordsworth is gaining an increasing number of followers, and "they were found too not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility and meditative minds" (587). Clearly Coleridge has more appreciation for these kind of readers, who would not have been in the ordinary or lower classes but of a more upper class and educated rank. This suggests an elitism in Coleridge, and while we accuse Wordsworth of being pretty self-satisfied, I'd venture to say Coleridge wasn't entirely humble either.
On one point I do feel Coleridge is consistent (or at least semi-consistent), and that is his value on language and specific words. He says that "whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction" (584). In traditional Romantic thought, words were believed to have incantatory power, and thus the weight resting on a single word would make it so that no other word could replace it. For Coleridge, each word must carry this weight, and therefore if the word can be removed or substituted, it obviously is not bearing the burden of incantatory power and is therefore worthless. Coleridge's emphasis on words continues when he is talking about good poetry, and his emphasis on content fitting the form (such as when he's talking about the "parts of which mutually support and explain each other") (589). So there, he's okay in my book. Otherwise, maybe not so much.